A new financial year, a continued focus on client advocacy

So, we closed our financial accounts for our first year in business this week. It is with a great sense of achievement that we have completed the first year of trading as Client Advocates. We’ve beaten all of our first year targets (were we too prudent in our budgeting or better than we thought – that’s between us and our accountant!) and we have generated a set of really great clients who we have helped over the year, by doing client advocacy.

There are lots of things that we have benefited from over the past 12 months – not least the remarkable value of resilience, the power of networking and of course the amazing support of family and friends.

However, the biggest contributing factor to us being successful in our first year has been the fact that we have done little-else but focus on clients: meeting them, listening to them, learning from them, understanding their businesses and issues, and thus helping them improving their strengths and fix or eradicate their weaknesses. As such we have met our clients-needs, by helping them grow their business more quickly and improving their EBIT performance.

Now we are really lucky – we are not a big, complex business. We can be flexible, and completely focus on clients – in fact as a start-up consultancy, that’s our only viable and valid positioning. The challenge we have, going into our new financial year, and I suspect many small and medium sized businesses are the same, is how to retain and focus on clients as the business grows and becomes more complex. Its a challenge we are looking forward to dealing with – both for the Client Advocates and for our clients.